Access to Work Scheme Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Work and Pensions
Luke Akehurst
Main Page: Luke Akehurst (Labour - North Durham)Department Debates - View all Luke Akehurst's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(1 day, 8 hours ago)
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Luke Akehurst (North Durham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I wholeheartedly commend the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) for securing today’s debate, for his eloquent description of the problems facing the Access to Work scheme and for allowing me a few minutes to contribute—in support of the views that he expressed.
I wanted to contribute to today’s debate as I am another example of an MP who has personally benefited from the Access to Work programme. My story has remarkable similarities to the hon. Member’s. In 2009, I was hit by a sudden-onset neurological illness. In my case, it was one called POEMS syndrome—POEMS stands for polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal gammopathy, and skin changes—but I am very familiar with GBS, the syndrome that the hon. Member experienced, as I was on the same hospital ward as patients with that condition.
My illness affected my mobility. I was in hospital—the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery on Queen Square—for five months. I was unable to stand, let alone walk, and spent a year using a wheelchair. It was during my five-month stay in hospital that I first learned about the Access to Work scheme. Without my physiotherapists and occupational therapists, I would not even have known that it existed. I worry that patients in other hospitals might not necessarily receive the guidance that I did at the National.
The Access to Work team worked closely with my then employer, making adjustments to my office environment to make it wheelchair friendly and helping to access funding to pay for taxis to and from work and to meetings outside the office. That support was crucial in allowing me to go back to work after my illness. Without it, I do not know what I would be doing now or whether I would have managed to achieve elected office. Recent reports, however, suggest that I was lucky then and even luckier compared with people now trying to join the Access to Work scheme. Stories and personal testimony mount of a scheme increasingly letting customers down, with more than 66,000 applications remaining unprocessed.
Last month, I was proud to write the foreword, alongside the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), to a report by the Disability Policy Centre, the UK’s only disability think-tank, about the Access to Work scheme. The research showed that, without the scheme, up to 50,000 disabled people across the country could find themselves out of work. At a time when the number of people out of work due to long-term illness is at a record high, I want to join hon. Members in urging the Government to give Access to Work significantly more funding, so that it can achieve faster processing and much greater visibility for its potential users.